dotfiles/README.adoc

Dotfiles

I use stow to sync my dotfiles between the OS and this repository.

Requirements

Install git and stow if not already present on the system.

Install via apt on Debian/Ubuntu

sudo apt install git stow

Install via brew on macos

brew install git stow

Setup and useage

My dev-machine setup will install and setup these dotfiles automatically. So, the only thing I’ve to care about is the stow . --adopt command and to commit changes to the VSC.

Checkout this repository into ~/dotfiles and apply run stow to sync the dotfiles.

The directory should be loacted directly in the HOME directory. Otherwise stow needs an additional flat -t $HOME everytime, which is a bit annoying!

git clone git@gitea.nehrke.info:nemoinho/dotfiles.git ~/dotfiles (1)
cd $_
stow --adopt . (2)
[ -n "$(git status --short)" ] && git restore . (3)

1	Clone this repository
2	Create symlinks for all files managed by this repository, so that the file in the $HOME points to the file in this repository
3	In case of differences between existing files and the ones from this repository keep the version of the repository

Removing files

If a file is going to be removed make sure to remove the linked file as well. Otherwise we end up with a bunch of dangling files in $HOME!

To automatically delete these dangling links we can use a git-hook as the following. That will remove the links pre-commit.

Setup git-hook to automatically remove links to deleted files

cat <<EOF > .git/hooks/pre-commit
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
git status --short | grep -E '^D|^R' | sed 's/...//;s/ -> .*//' | while read f
do
  test -L "\$HOME/\$f" && rm "\$HOME/\$f"
done
EOF
chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-commit